Red Sky at Morning
by natcat5
Summary: Alfred is drowning in Arthur and being burnt by him at the same time. It's a heady, euphoric feeling.


**I was thinking about that old classic, Love Will Find A Way delinquent au series by Liete, and realizing how much I still go for delinquent!Arthur/Alfred. I'm still such a sucker for it, even though it's an overdone trope. Gosh am I ever a sucker for it. Please enjoy this highly self-indulgent drabble.**

 **CW for unhealthy relationship, and the slight romanticization of unhealthy aspects of said unhealthy relationship.**

/

"Oh no, Alfred, don't bother with that boy, he's bad news," frowns his aunt. "Stay away from him. He's dangerous."

'Don't touch the candle flame,' says his mother.

'Don't touch the stove, it's too hot,' says his brother.

'Don't poke the logs with the stick, they'll fall over and the fire will get everywhere,' says his father.

Alfred has burn marks on his hands and fingers and legs from every hot, dangerous thing he's touched. He is no good at staying away from painful things, too entranced by fire light and smouldering heat. The promise of warmth and red-orange beauty before the inevitable burn.

Arthur's eyes are the green of the innermost ring of a flame, and Alfred's old burn scars ache. He knows he's going to drown in those eyes. Tumble down into that ring of fire and be full of wonder and elation, even as the flames eat him alive.

/

He has never been able to stay away from dangerous things.

Arthur looks like the rough, weather-scoured cement bricks of old buildings. Rough to the touch, but strangely brittle, dust and grit crumbling away into the wind at the faintest caress. His hair is bristly and his face is jagged, lips always half curled into a snarl, or a scowl. His hands mirror them, always half-curled into fists. He'd sooner bite you then talk to you, punch you then shake hands, and his hunched forward, slow and purposeful prowl, like a half-mad lion, flashes with a hundred and one warning signs. Like a crumbling, old cement brick building, everything about him says to approach is to do so at your own risk. Any moment the walls may come tumbling down, the floors might buckle, the ceiling might collapse, and you'll be buried under cracked stone, choked by dust and mortar, trapped.

 _You should have known better,_ they'll all say, staring down at you broken, bleeding, ruined. _Couldn't you see that building was about to fall down?_

/

"If you don't stop following me around, you'll get a knife for your troubles," spits Arthur, brimstone and burning coals.

"Gifts before even one date?" Alfred says, grinning crookedly, "Let me buy you coffee first."

Arthur splutters, caught off guard and indignant, and Alfred tries not to laugh as he's crowded against the wall. As Arthur fixes his face and pushes him against the brick and snarls threat after threat after threat, until he's breathless.

"I think you're more afraid of me, then I am of you," Alfred says. Except, he meant to only think it, not to say it out loud. The words tumble from his tongue, and Arthur's eyes widen. Alfred may deserve the headbutt to the nose he gets as a result. Poking at the smouldering logs with a stick, always disturbing the fire.

Blood runs down over his lips, the salt and copper of it stinging his tongue as he licks it away. Arthur's eyes on his mouth. Alfred grinning, teeth stained. Arthur's fingers curled into claws where they're fisted into his shirt.

It won't be the last time Arthur makes him taste blood, though the next time it will be a headier thing; teeth tearing and biting at lips, marking and pulling until all they can taste is the blood from each other's mouths, red-painted like they're at war, trailing lipstick-like marks down each other's necks and smearing it over collarbones. War paint, and the blood of the covenant, and Covergirl's latest.

 _Let's paint each other red,_ they don't say, nails dragging, welts and cuts and bloody lines, _Let no one be able to say we weren't here, and here, and here._

"I'm going to tear you apart," Arthur hisses, a lion's promise. A demon pact sealed with blood on his tongue and his lips and his lips and his tongue. Alfred feels the walls creak and groan with their promise to come tumbling down around his head and feels his body swell with the sear of the burns. Elation and ecstasy.

/

Alfred sees him riding his bike around town, swerving between cars, in and out of alleyways.

Alfred sees him leaning against buildings, loitering with a cigarette between his fingers, or a hip flask tipped back down his throat.

Alfred sees him, balanced precariously on the railing of the bridge, arms held out as he totters, eyes fixed forward, no glance to the churning waters below.

Alfred sees him.

Alfred sees him.

Alfred _sees_ him.

And one day, Arthur turns his head, and sees him back.

/

"Kids like that don't last," tsks one of his aunt's friends, following Alfred's eyes as he watches Arthur slink by, "Either they change and wise up, or they die young. And that one's been the way he is for a long time."

 _You're going to get burned, Alfred,_ a traitorous voice in his head whispers. _At worse, you'll end up buried alongside him._

"I believe in happy endings," Alfred breathes, eyes up towards the sky, the few scattered stars, the low hanging, luminescent moon. "I believe there's always a way for things to work out."

It's chilly, the curling smoke from Arthur's cigarette mingles with his breath in the night air. His eyes are low simmering embers, fixed on Alfred.

"Brat," he says flatly, exhaling smoke through his nose, "Idealistic, foolish brat. Do you want to live in a storybook?"

The end of the stick glows orange in the blue-black night, and Alfred pulls it out of the corner of Arthur's mouth, breathing in the smoke and the heat. He breathes in, and rubs his thumb along the underside of Arthur's wrist. He breathes in, and let's one hand brush through the back of Arthur's hair, fingers tickling the nape of his neck. He breathes in, and in, and in.

Arthur's eyes don't leave him, stay fixated on his face. As Alfred pulls back, he lifts his hand. Arthur's lips are dry and chapped, cracked at the corners. It's rough as he kisses the back of Alfred's hand, drags his mouth across his knuckles, open and hungry. The light flick of his tongue against Alfred's fingers, hot, burning, like a licking fire.

"I'm the dragon in this story," Arthur says, voice low and rough, a growl. "And there's no one to save you from me."

 _I will burn you and eat you alive. Will you jump from the tower to escape your fate? Will you raise your sword to save yourself?_

"I don't need to be saved," Alfred says, "I'm not afraid of fire."

Arthur laughs, a bitter, incredulous sound, and Alfred kisses him. The bite of his teeth is familiar, the touch of his wicked, serpent's tongue. Alfred gasps into his mouth and breathes in and in and in, all the fire and the smoke, the heat and the danger. Arthur was made for drowning in and Alfred is so happy to open his mouth and let him in.

/

Alfred, sitting in front of a coffeeshop, hot chocolate gone cold in front of him, eyes fixed across the street.

Arthur, on the other side of the sea of cars, leaning against a building with bruised face and bruised knuckles, staring back.

/

There are marks all the way down Alfred's neck, a blue-purple, red-ringed trail. They drag across his collarbone and encircle his neck, like a collar. Like the rope-burn of a noose. Alfred presses his mouth to the underside of Arthur's chin and Arthur's nails dig into his scalp. All he can taste is sweat and rainwater, salt and pollution. Their feet slide against the pavement and the pounding of the rain against the cement and concrete and gray soulless city skyline drowns out the low, frantic moans. Arthur wraps his arms around Alfred's neck and lets him heft him up, legs around his waist and ankles crossed at the small of his back. Alfred can feel bruises where their hips are pressed together, pain and pleasure and a stinging, insistent burn where Arthur's jeans are rubbing against his skin. Bruises on his back, bruises on his side. Bruises where Arthur kissed him so hard he banged into a wall. Bruises from when he lay on his back on the hard, stone-covered ground, Arthur on top of him. A dappling pattern across his skin, saying _This is brutal and violent and bad for you. You are bleeding on the inside. Your skin is discoloured and distorted. This is a brutal and violent thing._

But Alfred has lived a life of banged up knees and scraped elbows. He knows that life and learning is about falling down, about running into walls too fast, tripping over your feet and busting your head open on pointed table corners. Violence is everywhere. People bleed. Life hurts.

Arthur is covered in life hurts. Alfred can feel ridges of scar tissue on his side. Can see the white and pink puckered skin on his arms. New bruises on his face. A bloodied nose, a black eye, a split lip. A boy who lives in nights of shattered glass bottles, pipes and chains and the glint of knives in the moonlight. The echo of gunshots, the anonymity of back alley deaths.

Trying to move from his neck to his mouth, Alfred knocks his head against Arthur's ear by accident. Arthur jerks back, and he hisses in pain. There's a new piercing in that ear, the hole still raw and unhealed.

Arthur touches the silver stud protruding from his flesh, surrounded by pus and broken scab tissue. His fingers come away wet, and Alfred opens his mouth to apologize.

"It's okay," Arthur says, voice strange, lacking any of it's usual steel, "It was an accident."

/

Alfred is staying with his aunt for the year.

His parents have decided to move again. Following the flights of their fancy as they have done, as they have always done. His brother has decided to go to university in France, an apartment there where he will be allowed to put down roots for a few uninterrupted years, at least. But Alfred isn't ready to go to college yet. And he's tired of following his parents as they dance around the world. His aunt lived only a county away from their last house, and he likes her very much. So he arranged to stay here for the year, the 'gap' year between secondary school and university. While he decide what he wants. Where he wants to go. What he wants to do.

He doesn't know what he wants. To do.

Arthur's gaze on him is heavy. Is it with contempt? Pity? Green as forest and grass and fire, deep as an endless ocean pool. He looks tired.

"I wanted to last a little longer than people expect me to," Arthur states, after a long weighty silence, "That's all."

"I wanted to be a pilot, or an astronaut," Alfred says, eyes up, as they so often are, "I wanted to get off the ground, get lost in the sky. I don't know anymore."

"There are plenty of ways to get off the ground," Arthur says, vague. But not vague. Not the way their legs are dangling over the edge of the bridge, sitting on the railing eternity above and eternity below. Alfred shivers.

"I thought you wanted to last longer than people expected you to?" he asks. Arthur's grin is a grim and bitter thing.

"I'm nearly twenty now," he says, "I already have."

/

Alfred goes jogging through the park nearly every morning, and nearly every morning he finds Arthur there.

The tallest tree in the park, with NO CLIMBING signs stuck in the grass all around it. Arthur stretched out among the top branches, staring down with green eyes mirrored in the shifting leaves. A languid cat, amusedly observing the gangly limbed prey that's stumbled into his territory.

Alfred loops around, and circles back, and jogs the same path over and over, and always feels Arthur's eyes on him. Hunted.

/

"You've been out of the house a lot recently," frowns his aunt, "Have you made some friends? You can invite them over here, you know. I don't want you hanging around outside too much. This isn't the best part of town."

"Okay," Alfred says, blinking. "Sure."

Alfred does not invite Arthur anywhere.

Alfred follows Arthur with his eyes, and then Arthur follows Alfred with his feet. They follow each other until they meet, and clash, in violence and want, and then part again, opposite directions.

Alfred leaves the house after his aunt goes to work, and walks to the store to buy juice. On the way back, he feels Arthur following him. On a normal day, he'd follow him back, and they'd meet in the middle, and spend the day wrapped up and knotted. But today Alfred keeps walking home, looking over his shoulder occasionally to make sure Arthur is still following, knows that Alfred still wants him.

Arthur follows him. Maybe he doesn't know how to not, anymore. Maybe they've rubbed against one another so much and so frequently that they've become magnetized.

Arthur follows him. All the way back to his front door. And Alfred turns the key and leaves it open wide. Walks in, puts the juice in the fridge, turns around, and waits.

He doesn't invite Arthur in, but he doesn't need to. And when he climbs the stairs towards his bedroom, it's with a familiar warmth at his back, and familiar calloused and dry fingers running up and down his arm.

And then.

Arthur _shoves_ him backwards, so that the backs of his knees hit the side of his bed and he goes tumbling onto the mattress, springs creaking beneath him. His gaze is hungry, hungrier than Alfred's ever seen him, and he feels exposed, an open wound, raw for the gouging. And Arthur descends on him like a carnivore to the feast, pinning him down and digging teeth into his throat, his neck, the underside of his chin. Alfred's head's thrown back, mouth open and gasping. His entire body is boiling. Arthur's hands are hot where they're running up his torso, rough and calloused across his ribcage, teasing his lower belly and the wasteband of his pants, up to his chest. Alfred imagines his skin burning, imagines the skin peeling and blistering and bubbling wherever Arthur touches, claws digging in to the ruined flesh and teeth biting whatever parts are left unmarred.

It's familiar, the heat and the teeth, but different at the same time. Once their clothes are off, once their frantic movements slow into slow, purposeful touches, the tempo changes. It's their first time inside, their first time slowly stripping each other down to nothing but skin. Their first time without the rain or the sound of cars or the smell of violence and garbage in the air. And Alfred wants to memorize the feel of it. Arthur's bare skin pressed against his, the movement of their hips, echoed by the rhythmic shifting of the bed beneath them. The dragging of his lips down down down. Still teeth and tongue and fire but the insistent touch of each other's hands and the sliding of their lips against one another, and the thud of Arthur's heartbeat, pressed against his.

 _I'm drowning._ Arthur's eyes and voice and his one hundred and one vices and demons. _I'm burning._ Arthur's hands and teeth and nails and the feel of his skin and chest and body.

 _I think I'm in love._ After, when they don't do as they do. They don't clash and consume and then part. Instead, Arthur falls asleep on Alfred's bed and Alfred presses his face to the back of Arthur's neck and breathes in and in and in.

/

Arthur is an endless drop down and a whirlpool of emotion and sensation that Alfred will never pull himself out of. He hadn't realized how much he'd stopped caring for things, how much he'd numbed over the years, until he was thrust back into the world of emotion and caring and passion. Until his entire heart was clawed out of his chest and held triumphantly aloft by a violent, territorial, volatile lion.

"You're mine," Arthur hisses, pinning him against a wall and grinding, teeth pressed to his neck.

"You're mine," Arthur says grumpily, sounding indignant, like a child, while Alfred laughs, waving goodbye to the blushing girl who had unsuccessfully tried to ask for his number.

"You're mine?" Arthur whispers, half-disbelieving. Curled up against Alfred's side and sitting on the roof of Alfred's aunt's house. Life has hurt him again, left black eyes and red marks, and Alfred presses his face to the top of his head. Arthur smells like blood and alcohol and the dirty water that pools in alleys and deserted back streets. His body is a bruised and battered thing, wiry and always coiled, ready to spring and to flight and to fight. And he fits perfectly against Alfred, in his arms.

If the walls are crumbling, then Alfred is strong enough to catch the rubble, to collect and to save, to stand on the foundations and build something new, something stronger.

"Since I first saw you trying to eviscerate me with the force of your glare from across the Costa parking lot." Alfred says, rubbing his thumb back and forth along the top of Arthur's hand, "Since then, and always."

Arthur laughs, a short, painful sounding snort. "Insensible fool," he says, then stills a little, expression bemused. "But then again, I've willingly submitted myself to you, so who's the bigger fool between the two of us, hm?"

Alfred grins. "And are you mine?" he asks.

"Since I first saw you carrying a large coffee in each hand, with another balanced on your head, like a bloody loon." Arthur admits, and Alfred ducks his face into the nape of Arthur's neck, glowing.

/

"Are you happy, Alfred?" his mother asks, on the phone. "Are you sure this is still what you want?"

 _You used to want to fly, you used to have ambition, you used to be more._ She doesn't say.

But Alfred left all of that behind the fifth time they moved, when they left Virginia, the only place that ever felt like home, for another continent, for England. The Alfred who wanted to soar began to yearn for the chance to put some roots into the ground, for the chance to stay, to slow down a little. To rest in one place, to lie down and find home again.

"Yes," he says, and means it. He's finally started to remember what 'home' feels like.

And at the same time, his eyes begin to drift upwards. Again and again and again, like the wide-eyed child of hopes and dreams and optimism that he'd thought he left behind. He finally finds home, and in doing so, remembers the sky.

/

One early morning, Alfred finds Arthur in the very back of the park, slumped against a bench with blood on his clothes and blood on his face and blood in his hair.

And then they're in the shitty park bathroom, Arthur up on the counter as Alfred dabs at his face with tissues and cools his flushed skin with cold water, and they don't kiss, and they don't tear at each other, but afterwards they go out to the big tree, and Alfred leans against the trunk, and Arthur lets himself slump down into his arms, and they watch the sun finish rising to the top of the sky, together.

/

He wants to chase the sky again.

He never wants to stop holding Arthur in his arms.

He doesn't know when it stopped being sharp, pointed, and scalding, and when it softened itself into something gentler and subtler in its warmth. He doesn't know when the teeth disappeared from their kisses, and the claws from their touch.

But it is what it is, and Alfred knows what he wants again, and Arthur has turned twenty and stopped balancing on precarious bridge railings.

Everything's beginning again, and they both have the chance to soar.

/

"I was thinking of going on a trip," Alfred tells his brother over Skype, "Up north. I think it'd be cool to go up those mountains. Don't you think it'd be cool to go up those mountains?"

His brother looks a little confused, but smiles politely all the same.

"Be careful Alfred," he says, "Don't fall."

He's finally remembered what it's like to feel the sky within him, to feel the urge to spread his wings and test the limits. His first love was the endless blue above and his second love has helped him find it again. He's ready to go. He knows what he _wants._

"To the sky? With you?" Arthur repeats, incredulous, "To the mountains?"

"A roadtrip," Alfred says, "Kind of also a hiking trip and a camping trip. I was also thinking of crossing over and going to Scotland as well. I've never actually been to the top of a mountain. Have you?"

Arthur stares at him, expression a myriad of tumbling emotions.

"You'll find I'm terrible travelling company," he says, after a long silence, "And probably chuck me off the first mountain you get to."

"I'll follow you down," Alfred says, "I mean, I've already fallen for you once."

Arthur blinks. Turns scarlet. Buries his face into his hands. And then buries his face into Alfred's jacket. And Alfred laughs until his stomach hurts. This is love. This is love, this is love, this is love. He presses soft kisses all over Arthur's cheeks and forehead and eyelids and lips and drinks in the soft sighs of contentment he gets like he's starving for it.

/

Arthur is still a lion, and he is still a capricious, foul-tempered thing, and he still smokes and drinks and gets into scraps with people who cross him. The vicious, bad news, dangerous boy Alfred was warned away from. A condemned, collapsing building. A pit of fire made for drowning and excruciating consumption.

But he is also so much more than that.

"This is my boyfriend, Arthur," Alfred says, unable to hide his grin, "Arthur, say hello."

"Hello," repeats Arthur dutifully, looking more nervous then Alfred's ever seen him. With good reason, Alfred supposes.

But Alfred's aunt surprises them both, smiling, and offering her hand for Arthur to shake, and asks if he's staying for dinner.

It's not as hard for people to change as everyone makes it out to be.

/

The sky is waiting.

For both of them.

/

"Be careful Alfred," says his dad sternly, "It's easy to get into trouble up there. Stay away from anything dangerous."

"Don't I always?" Alfred replies with a winning smile, and in the background, Arthur starts to laugh.

/

 **You'll pry flagrant misuse of postmodernism from my cold, dead hands.**

 **I promise I'm working on the next chapter of Dragons in the Backyard. In fact, I'm working on the next three chapters!**

 **Amazingly enough, working on three chapters at once does not make the updating process any faster.**


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